Posts filed under 'blackness'

The Delimitation of Self: Kevin Claiborne on Mixed-Media Art, Blackness, and Material

September 5, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Junyi Zhou

I’m interested in how the layering of text and image can create or disrupt tension, structure, rhythm, perception, and interpretation.

In Kevin Claiborne’s multimedia work, he sources from personal archives, landscape, and anthropological studies to coalesce a vision of Black American history into its contemporary variations, spanning the realms of collective and private histories. “Starting with the gaps in my own family history, and the space between ‘what I know vs. what I should know,’ the missing information between where my ancestors come from and where I am today, I am digging and mining the sediment of histories, passed down, erased, and avoided,” he writes. In “BLACK ENOUGH,” his 2020 exhibition at Thierry Goldberg, he poses a series of questions against the landscapes of Joshua Tree. Some of his questions, such as “Is Black enough?” and “When is Black enough?,” are clipped in the frame, leaving the sentences unfinished, like the Black lives that are prematurely cut short. Extending his reflections on Black identity and memory, Claiborne’s 2023 exhibition, “Family Business,” took a slightly different turn. Drawing from a box of family photographs, he applied green and blue pigments to the images, condensed moments in which his mother, beaming with a radiant smile, once gazes affectionately at his father. The result is a heightened revision of his family archive, a rediscovery of the ties that bind him to his kinsfolk: their shared passions, dreams, and tears. In this following interview, he speaks on materiality, capturing Black lives in Black contexts, and embedded dialogues within his visuality.

Junyi Zhou (JZ): From the beginning of your career, you’ve combined written texts with visual materials. How did this idea come to you initially?

Kevin Claiborne (KC): For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an interest in the power of words—their potential, their malleability, their limitations, and their ability to shape meaning. I’ve always been impressed with people who have mastered their expression of the written word, and who understand how to literally and metaphorically paint with text. My earliest inspirations were graffiti artists, poets, and rappers, all of whom understood the nuances of language, how the weight of words changes with scale, and how to use text as a material.

When I first started using photography and archival images in a conceptual manner, incorporating text seemed like a logical next step. Words change meaning depending on present context, and context can change depending on the words that are present.

JZ: I know that you started out as a photographer. How do you see your multimedia/cross-media approach? Does it impose certain limitations on your objective (if there is one) as an artist, or is it the ultimate means for you to channel your message?

KC: Sometimes my mixed-media or multimedia approach offers the ability to enhance and increase the complexity of my work, and other times, it shifts the focus from the material composition of the work to the ideas embedded within. Every material has a story, a purpose, a history, and a language or logic to its usage. Sometimes, the material becomes the focus, and sometimes certain material combinations allow the viewer to have more entry points into appreciating, understanding, or engaging with the work. It depends on the context. READ MORE…

Skin Has Two Sides: Bruna Dantas Lobato on Translating Jeferson Tenório

January 11, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

. . . racism and colorism affect all of us . . . there’s no interpersonal relationship that isn’t shaped by it.

In 2023, Bruna Dantas Lobato won a PEN Translates grant for her work on Jeferson Tenório’s The Dark Side of Skin, a moving, feeling novel of how relationships—between parent and child, between lovers, between a body and a city—change, develop, and intwine against powerful institutions and worldly violences. Through the story of Pedro—which is in turn told through the life of his murdered father—Tenório vividly inscribes the urbanity of Porto Alegre and the generations that move through it, along with the cruelty, the mystery, and the love. In this interview, Lobato speaks on the novel’s treatment of racism, its refractions of Baldwin, and how its author draws on Brazil’s rich aesthetic canon.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): You’ve spoken before about how passionate you are about translating titles from the northeast of Brazil, but The Dark Side of Skin takes place in in southern Brazil—Porto Alegre—and Tenório has spoken about how the racism it describes is one that is expressed more pointedly in regards to the city’s relatively homogenous population. Could you speak a little bit about how geography or regionality works in this novel, and also about what drew you to translate it?

Bruna Dantas Lobato (BDL): The Northeast of Brazil, where I grew up, is very underrepresented in literature both in Brazil and abroad. There are very few authors from that region available in translation, especially compared to the whiter metropoles. I’d love to see a greater range of stories from different parts of Brazil in English, so we don’t keep reading the same versions of Latin America over and over again. 

I was drawn to Tenório’s novel for similar reasons, for how it presents the experience of a Black man in a predominantly white city with insight and tenderness. It’s a beautiful and painful book, and to have Tenório join the slate of Porto Alegre authors widely available in English with a different kind of book was important to me. I hope the publishers who often tell me that they already have their one Brazilian author—or one author from a certain region—will see that one voice can’t possibly represent a whole country.

XYS: A significant portion of the novel is written in the second person, which is a literary point-of-view that I think is especially sensitive to each individual language and the culture it stems from (e.g. in terms of interpersonal hierarchies, categories of persons, speech-acts). How was it working with the second person here?

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Announcing Our December Book Club Title: Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside? by Max Lobe

December 30, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

To open up poverty is to open up migration is to open up blackness is to open up the love between two men.

For our final Book Club selection of the year, Asymptote is proud to present a work emblematic of how writing can transform, subvert, and negate borders. In Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside?, Swiss author Max Lobe traces how the complex factors of race, class, sexuality, and migration can cohere in a single life, and how nationhood can be refracted and reinterpreted by those who refuse to be defined by the standard. Speaking in the extraordinarily vivid voice of his protagonist, Mwana, Lobe balances tragedy with joy, freedom with entrapment, and home with home.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.  

Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside? by Max Lobe, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, Hope Road Publishing, 2022

As in love, mystery, and metamorphosis, the name of country draws a long throughline in our world of stories. Add to it a possessive—my country, your country—and the resulting narratives are instantly elaborated with the ontological intersections, demarcations, and dialogues that enmesh our landscape. Through this simple addition, a life is juxtaposed with a society, a single act comes to emblematise a culture, and an experience constitutes an identity—not necessarily out of any active political consciousness, but simply from having left, at some point, that arbitrary and mutable shape of one’s birthplace. Paul Gilroy, in conceptualising diaspora, described it as positing “important tensions between here and there, then and now, between seed in the bag, the packet or the pocket and seed in the ground, the fruit or the body.” To move across our jigsaw world is to know the fluid weight of difference and sameness—that they can be at once interchangeable and oppositional. These shifts from strangeness to familiarity do not begin with the boarding of a plane or a boat, but occur in minute swatches of conversation, in the passing from one minute to the next, between two people looking out at the same scene, not knowing what the other sees.

In Max Lobe’s Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside?, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, country is introduced by the most immediate and intimate of desires—food. Our narrator, Mwana, is lugging “two huge sugar-cane bags” across Switzerland, with all the provisions and gifts of another nation inside: “Fumbwa, saka-saka, makayabu, okra and dried impwa.” The list goes on, rich with sugars and starches and svelte oils. Wrapped meticulously by his mother, the treasured packages have been carried by his sister Kosambela, across the continental divide from what Mwana calls Bantuland, to the nation where they both now reside: Switzerland of the Grütli Meadow and the Rütli Oath, of white-out peaks and lakeshore villas.

A recent graduate of the University of Geneva and a settled Swiss resident, Mwana is black, queer, and unemployed; it is this lattermost factor that rules his life, his daily preoccupations, and his physical and mental wanderings. With repeated trips to the unemployment office, small yellow coins dug out of household crevices, kindly deceptive calls to his mother—this scarcity is the precipice that Mwana dangles from, and as such it is the swinging, breakneck angle by which he interprets everything. The two bags he drags onto the bus from Lugano to Geneva contain emblems of home, of care, and of a beautiful eradication of distance, but most importantly, they are an antidote to hunger. Amidst Lobe’s warm, loquacious prose, we first see the dissipation of difference into sameness, the shift from displacement in country to immediacy in the body. In all the discursive paths the mind takes to arrive at a single place, we see the need to live. READ MORE…

Blackness and the Experience of Blackness: Paulo Scott and Daniel Hahn on Phenotypes

February 24, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Rachel Farmer

I think if you read a sentence in Portuguese, you would recognize it as a Paulo Scott sentence from two hundred meters away.

In the electrifying novel Phenotypes, Paulo Scott takes on the complex subject of Brazil’s racism and colorism, dispelling rosy myths of the country as one of harmonious multiculturalism. In a story of two brothers—Lourenço and Federico, the former dark-skinned and the latter light—the intricacies of privilege, identity, activism, and guilt are brilliantly explored in Scott’s unmistakable blend of length and lyric, bringing to the page some of the most urgent and daunting questions of our time. We are honored to host this title as our Book Club selection for January, and also to have spoken live to Scott and translator Daniel Hahn about the novel’s nuances, regionality, and language.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

Rachel Farmer (RF): One of the main themes of Phenotypes is what constitutes an activist approach to the many problems portrayed in the novel. Paulo, could you talk about what inspired you to write about activism in this way?

Paulo Scott (PS): Well Rachel, I come from Southern Brazil, which is a very racist region. My family is black, upper-middle class—you know, the kind of family that is in a position to speak out against this racism. So I took the truth of my family to create fiction. My brother is black—real black—and I have this lighter skin. But I see myself as a black man. My mother might deny it now, but as I remember, she always said that we were a black family.

I think that this book is both one of anger and of self-reflection. The protagonist found a place in the heart of anger to build a very specific story for himself, then at some point, he got lost in this fight against racism. He believed himself to be really strong, he saw his father as a very strong man, and he thought that his father’s power was in this anger, his rage against the world—but it wasn’t. Instead, the fact is that his father could understand the complexity of racism, like [Martin Luther] King [Jr.].

There is a connection between the members of this family: father, grandfather, son, and granddaughter—Roberta, the niece of the protagonist. They are almost the same entity, as three different movements of the same vision. The story ends with Roberta sleeping in the back seat of the car because she’s the future. I could have written a book about Roberta, for efficiency’s sake, but this is not a book of answers; this is a book of questions. The racism in Brazil is very, very strong, and it’s still a taboo topic here. The suffering is so pervasive that some readers struggle to see themselves in this mirror. 

RF: Were certain characters—such as that of the mother—inspired directly by the memories of your own family?

PS: My brother was the coach of my state’s basketball team, and he is a really dark-skinned man. He’s not afraid to be with white people—powerful people. He’s black, but he’s in that club of the upper-class, and he doesn’t accept any disrespect. That’s really strong. READ MORE…

Creating What One Cannot Find: In Conversation with Deborah Ekoka

July 3, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Layla Benitez-James

Cervantes called Sevilla “the chess board” because there were as many blacks as there were whites.

Today on the blog, podcast editor Layla Benitez-James draws us into the vibrant but seldom-discussed community of Black writers in Spain. In this essay-interview hybrid, she introduces us to two booksellers working to amplify the voices and and experiences of black Spanish writers.

In the past year, I have interviewed three of the panelists from the 2018 Tampa AWP panel sponsored by ALTA, “Translating Poetry, Translating Blackness,” for the Asymptote podcast: Lawrence Schimel, John Keene and, Aaron Coleman. My last interview with Coleman gave me a quote which has been rewritten at the beginning of each new journal I’ve started since December as it got at something that I have often felt but never expressed so well: literary translation is a tool to make more vivid the relationships between Afro-descendent people in the Americas and around the world.

I was reminded of the first time I read Tram 83 by Fiston Mwanza Mujila and Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Of course, nothing overlapped with my life exactly, but there was this kind of constant shock and pleasure at recognizing pieces of my identity described by people from places I had never been, a sense of belonging and kinship.

Beyond dictionaries and historical reference works, in my latest projects I have relied heavily on community to understand the context of the text. I moved to Spain in 2014 to work on translation and improve my Spanish. I had fallen in love with the practice after a translation workshop at the University of Houston and started translating the work of Madrid-born and based poet Óscar Curieses. After a teaching placement in the city of Murcia flung me much farther south than I had originally planned, I began to find incredible Murcian poets, like Cristina Morano, Bea Mirales, José Daniel Espejo, and José Óscar López, whose work I wanted to bring into English.

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